Imagine
this. I am sitting at a café catching up on a few e-mails on my phone while enjoying
my morning latte. As I pick up the glass, I forgot to read the warning that the
glass may be hot so I instinctively let go of the hot glass and coffee spills
everywhere – including all over my phone.
Despite
my best efforts to dry said phone, it is dead. No life. Nothing. I take it to
my friendly local phone retailer and, despite their best efforts, it is too wet
to be anything but a pretty paperweight.
I
buy a new phone a little annoyed with myself for incurring an additional
unwanted expense but what happens next can turn my day into a mild annoyance or
a major catastrophe.
Scenario
1. I have my phone setup to synchronise my e-mail and contacts into my Cloud
environment. My photos are set to backup into the Cloud as I take them. I plug
my phone into my PC on a regular basis and backup the entire phone. I take my
new phone, plug it into my PC and restore the data since the last backup and
then sync the most recent files with my Cloud storage. An interruption to my
day and some expense for the new phone but life continues.
Scenario
2. Cue dark foreboding music. My life was on my phone. All my contacts; my
e-mails; my photos and videos of the kids; my passwords. My life. I take my new
phone and I feel empty. My life will start anew. I will have to rely on my memory
to ring my wife. I will have to talk to my kids to remember how they looked at
that birthday party. My life is over.
Ok
so maybe Scenario 2 is a little over the top. Maybe only my life as I currently
know it is over. I need to rebuild.
The
stats on the second scenario are a little scary. 37 per cent of mobile users
never backup their data. Maybe that is OK because not many people lose their
data completely? Think again. 70 million smartphones are lost annually. By my
quick maths, that is about 26 million people each and every year who experience
scenario 2. When you combine the stat that 64 per cent of people would be more
upset about loss of data from their device than the device itself, we have 17
million upset people every year with loss of data from their smartphone.
Luckily
we are in a pretty good position to address this issue. We have good
connectivity speeds with the NBN and our 4G network and there are services that
exist for the sole purpose of replicating data from your phone to the Cloud.
The setup of these services is relatively simple and, generally, it is set and
forget so you can be confident that your synchronisation is just happening –
although I still like to test it on a regular basis.
The
online storage of information is an exploding area in the world of technology.
The information above is limited to just phones but when you add servers and
PCs into the mix, you start to gain an appreciation of how much data is being
produced – and hopefully backed up.
By
the year 2020, it is estimated that 1.7 Megabytes will be created every second
for each person on the planet. Some suspect most of this data consists of bad
selfies and videos of cats playing with a ball of wool! It is putting
incredible pressure on Cloud storage providers and Internet infrastructure.
What
is almost as scary as the mobile phone backup stats is that only 8 per cent of
people backup their PC data daily and 24 per cent have never backed up at all.
I have an extremely complicated backup regime advisory concept called KYT. The
Kick Yourself Theory. Pick any random device you have in your possession right
now. Imagine it is stolen or it takes a drink. Now think about the data that is
on there. If all of that data is lost, how hard would you kick yourself? If it
is mild annoyance, then continue on and have a nice day. If you would give
yourself a firm boot up the behind, then maybe it is time to review your backup
strategy (if indeed you have a backup strategy).
This
is not a problem that is going away. 90 per cent of the world’s data was
created in the last two years. That is incredible exponential growth and I
can’t see it heading any other way than up.
So
have a look at your data. Consider its importance and then think about what you
might do in the case of needing to recover it. And be careful when you pick up
your hot latte!
Mathew Dickerson